Always Include Tasks On Peer Or Competitor Websites

Spending a whole hour on a single website can be boring for you and your participant. But boredom isn’t the only problem. All your findings and observations are based on an isolated case. You have no real understanding of whether that person always goes to the search box, or whether they just did it on your website because they were confused by the navigation options. Just looking at one website doesn’t give you a realistic picture of how people use the web.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Make the time in your test plan to look at competitor or peer websites as part of your test. The best way to do this is to ask participants at the start of the test what websites they currently use and ask them to show you. Then you can introduce a competitor or peer website they haven’t used before. You’ll find that you learn much more about their patterns of behavior and why they choose one website over another, and more importantly you’ll learn what works well on other websites and why. This is a great source of inspiration when you need to solve a tricky usability problem on your website.

Don’t Let Them Know Which Website You Are Testing Straight Away

I have made the mistake in the past of making it obvious what website I am testing. Sometimes this is difficult to avoid, but if you can, I would advise it. The main reason is that it can be very hard for anyone to be completely honest about their experience with a website when you work for the company either as an employee or as an agent.

KEY TAKEAWAY

If I haven’t been involved in the design of the website prior to the test, I always emphasize my independence. Another trick is to get participants to look at competitor websites and give you honest feedback on them before visiting the actual website you are testing. If you can do this without them knowing which website you are really testing, you have a much higher chance of them offering their honest initial thoughts. Towards the end of the test it is likely to be obvious as you’ve spent most of your time setting tasks on one website, but by then you should have been able to get a good understanding of their honest first impressions.

Proximity

Elements that are close to each other are perceived as more related than elements that lie farther apart (a, below).

Similarity

Viewers will associate and treat as a group elements that share consistent visual characteristics (b, below).

Continuity

We prefer continuous, unbroken contours and paths, and the vast majority of viewers will interpret c, below, as two crossed lines, not four lines meeting at a common point.

Closure

We have a powerful bias to see completed figures, even when the contours of the figure are broken or ambiguous. We see a white rectangle overlying four circles (a, opposite), not four circles that each have a section missing.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16